European roundup: Dortmund and Leipzig slip up as PSG go top of Ligue 1   13%

• Dortmund’s Reus misses penalty, Leipzig draw at Wolfsburg
• PSG go top in Ligue 1 after Angers win, Marseille slump to Nîmes
  

Borussia Dortmund had to come from behind to rescue a 1-1 home draw against struggling Mainz on Saturday that kept them in fourth place in the Bundesliga, four points off the top.

Dortmund, who missed a late penalty, wasted a slew of chances while Jude Bellingham also hit the woodwork. Mainz then struck with their first chance after the break as Levin Öztunalı picked up the ball in midfield, beat one defender and released an unstoppable left-footed missile from 25 metres out.

Sinners or trendsetters? A forgotten trio of 19th-century Jewish feminists   25%

Three women who were way ahead of their time, educated and famous for their Berlin soirees – but ignored for centuries by Jewish historians because they converted to Christianity

The Nets Looked Unstoppable Early. Theyve Proved to Be Mortal.   10%

Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving have meshed well. But the team has lost a starter to injury, and the bench lineup has often been outplayed. Recent changes are promising.

Covid-19: The challenges of home-schooling   50%

With a lack of devices, broadband and time, online school is proving stressful for many.

Iranian judoka tells Israeli counterpart: 'You're my best friend'   25%

Saeid Mollaei, who defected after Iranian authorities pressured him not to compete against Israeli Sagi Muki, competed on Saturday for the first time since his receiving refugee status

The Arabic Booker Prize could make history this year   8%

This could be the first time a woman is named the sole winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction

BCCI to discuss bigger IPL window in next FTP  

With the Indian Premier League (IPL) set to have two new teams from the 2022 season, BCCI is working on ways to get a bigger window in the international calendar to accommodate a longer IPL.

'A special instinct': Guardiola praises Phil Foden after Man City victory video  

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola had only words of praise for midfielder Phil Foden, whose first-half goal secured his side's win against Brighton. During the post-match press conference, Guardiola also addressed Covid-19 restrictions on goal celebrations: 'the moment you score a goal and one guy runs and the other one, doesn''t go to celebrate with him, it is weird, it is uncomfortable'

• Phil Foden's moment of class sets up Manchester City victory over Brighton

Through the looking glass: Europe's captive primates in pictures  

These chimps, baboons and macaques look sombre as they stare out from their enclosures into Anne Berry’s camera. Her aim is to make viewers feel compassion with them

Thailand allows visitors to play golf in quarantine   50%

At six resorts, visitors will be able to play golf, rather than just having to isolate in their rooms.

Jerusalem artist spotlights Israelis and Palestinians who were burned alive  

A series of works, jolting in their simplicity, center on the names of eight Israelis and Palestinians who burned themselves to death or were burned alive

Football transfer rumours: Chelsea and Spurs to fight over Kim Min-jae?   -6%

Today’s piffle is, like many of us these days, mostly staying put

This Gareth Bale thing hasn’t really worked out for either party, has it? Not least because all the golf courses are shut. Tottenham Hotspur are unlikely to seek an extension to Bale’s loan deal for next season, sending the Welsh living legend back to Real Madrid. Reopen the golf courses, Johnson!

Related: PSG and Pochettino step up efforts to sign Tottenham's Dele Alli on loan

Pogba takes Man Utd top with win at Burnley   25%

Paul Pogba took Manchester United top of the Premier League for the first time in three years as his deflected winner saw off a dogged Burnley 1-0 at Turf Moor Tuesday.

Wizards appoint Amber Nichols as NBA G League's 2nd female GM   -25%

Amber Nichols, who played four years of college basketball at Richmond, has been with the Go-Go since the team's inception. She managed its logistics the past two seasons and has worked with the Wizards' front office during NBA and G League drafts and scouting events.

Jeff Petry, Tomas Tatar each score a pair as Canadiens dominate Oilers  

Jeff Petry and Tomas Tatar each scored twice Saturday to lead the Montreal Canadiens to a 5-1 victory over the Oilers in Edmonton.

Rooney-mania had many ages but his defining moment remains the first | Jonathan Liew   16%

It is the basic paradox of Rooney that a player of such emotional heft will ultimately be judged largely on numbers and records

In a way, it was the perfect understated ending: with a short, sober statement on the Derby County website. New manager appointed at struggling Championship club. Signs a two-and-a-half-year deal after a cautiously successful stint in caretaker charge. Liam Rosenior to be his assistant.

Meanwhile – buried in the seventh paragraph, as if an entirely incidental detail – England and Manchester United’s all-time leading goalscorer has decided to retire as a footballer.

Your Daily Horoscope for Wednesday, January 13   30%

Free daily horoscope for each star sign from renowned Astrologer Hedy Damari. Forecasts for the day ahead in life, love and career.

Court forces Israels government to funnel millions in funding for womens soccer   26%

Petition sought to challenge a distorted division of public funds that had favored male soccer leagues

Berger & Wyse on naughty dogs cartoon  

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Hudsonville Ice Cream introduces 2 limited-edition flavors   30%

"Our flavor development team has been hard at work dreaming up incredible new flavors for 2021," said Rachel Messingschlager of Hudsonville Ice Cream.

It was joyous: Sun returns to some Nunavut communities for first time in weeks   25%

A Playwrights New Subject: Her Husband, the Pandemic Expert  

Prolific and widely-produced, Lauren Gunderson didn’t have to look far to create “The Catastrophist,” a play about risk that’s both timely and personal.

Covid-19: BBC's Fergal Keane revisits St Marys and Charing Cross Hospital 10 months on  

As the UK records its highest death toll, Fergal Keane has been to see the strain the NHS is under for the second time.

Australia v India: fourth Test, day three live!  

• Live coverage of day three of the final Test of the series from the Gabba
• Barney Ronay: Why Australia v India is series for these times
• Have your say via email or tweet @scott_heinrich
  

4.43am GMT

87th over: India 253-6 (Sundar 38, Thakur 33) Boundaries and more boundaries. Thakur plays possibly the shot of the session, driving Cummins down the ground, before adding four more with a flash outside off that he almost pulls out of, but softens his hands enough to not present a catching chance. Excellent batting. This partnership is now getting out of hand from an Australian point of view. Worth 67 runs in good time, it’s now beyond nuisance value and just what India need. Time for tea.

4.39am GMT

86th over: India 245-6 (Sundar 38, Thakur 25) Hazlewood continues but there are no catchers near the bat for Thakur. The paceman nonetheless drops one in short, allowing Thakur to fend away for a single. But it looks like it caught him on a knuckle on his left hand, causing a delay as he receives treatment from medical staff. Magic spray nowhere in sight, however. When play resumes, Thakur watches from the non-striker’s end as Sandur clips Hazlewood off his pads for three. What an impressive debut this is becoming for this young man.

Fans curious how Sex and the City will evolve in reboot   -21%

Fans of Sex and the City have mixed feelings about the recently announced reboot. Some are disappointed Kim Cattrall won’t return as Samantha, but others are curious to see how And Just Like That evolves with the characters’ ages and the times.

Steve McQueens Ethos of Generosity   5%

Steve McQueen has an eye for the tiniest of details. The British director’s first short film, Bear, depicts how a series of looks exchanged between two men builds into a physical showdown. His debut feature, Hunger, tells the real-life story of an Irish nationalist who died on a hunger strike through jarring bits of minutiae about his physical deterioration. And though McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave has a broader scope, adapting Solomon Northup’s memoir of enslavement, the film’s most indelible scenes are the ones that bear silent witness. At one point, Northup is hanged from a tree and survives only by stretching his toes to the ground; McQueen’s camera shows life going on around him, with people doing their chores in the background of a ghastly tableau. Even when making a Hollywood blockbuster—his last film was the heist thriller Widows—McQueen can coax powerful political commentary from a banal sequence.

[Read: The blunt-force power of ‘Widows,’ in one scene]

The director brings the same observational power to his latest project: Small Axe, a five-part film series on Prime Video that wrestles with the explosive changes in Black life in Britain from the late 1960s to the early ’80s. Recently named the best film of 2020 by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Small Axe has been garnering awards buzz in recent weeks. The series, which blurs the line between TV and cinema, aired on the BBC in the U.K. partly because McQueen wanted it to reach the widest audience possible. “I wanted my mother to turn on the TV and see these images, see these stories, and have easy accessibility to these narratives,” the 51-year-old filmmaker told me when we spoke last week. Small Axe encompasses history and personal memoir, shifting from dramatic biopic to riotous comedy to melancholy romance. But like all of McQueen’s work, this engrossing anthology thrives in the littlest details, celebrating mundane moments alongside monumental legal triumphs.

The first two Small Axe films have remarkably different settings and stakes. The opening story, Mangrove, takes place in Britain’s famous Old Bailey criminal court and recounts the groundbreaking 1970 trial of the Mangrove Nine, in which Black activists successfully defended themselves against charges of inciting a riot. The second film, Lovers Rock, is set at a house party in West London a decade later; the emphasis is less on plot and more on embracing love and collective joy in a safe space. Still, to McQueen, the two works share a deeper connection.  

“A lot of films I make are about ritual,” he told me. “The party in Lovers Rock and the courtroom in Mangrove—ritual. You wake up in the morning, what’s the first thing you do? Maybe you wipe the sleep from your eyes, you have a thought or two, you throw the duvet to one side, you get up, you scratch your bum, you look at yourself in the mirror, you brush your teeth … It’s the best contemporary dance, and you don’t even know you’re doing it.”

[Read: Steve McQueen’s unblinking look at life and afterlife]

In Mangrove, the activists are challenging the archaic rituals of Britain’s legal system. The trial marked the beginning of a longer reckoning with the country’s systemic ills, McQueen said: “This is the first time Black people in the U.K. had an opportunity to challenge, question, and cross-examine the powers that be.” Several of the Mangrove Nine defendants represented themselves, winning the first judicial acknowledgment of “racial hatred” in London’s Metropolitan Police. The activists’ strategy combined public protest and incisive questioning, successfully turning the courthouse into a bully pulpit. “It’s almost like tai chi, [the defendants] took the energy of the gallery and used it against them,” McQueen said. Mangrove uses the tropes of the courtroom movie—and the grand, inquisitorial aesthetics of the British legal system, powdered wigs and all—to tell a new kind of story.   

The next film, Lovers Rock, opens with a house party being set up—furniture moved, sound systems erected, dance floors cleared—as an introduction to an institutional space very different from the soulless Old Bailey. “It’s [like] a church,” McQueen said of the party. “[Lovers Rock is] based on my aunt, who used to sneak out of my grandmother’s house, go to the blues, and then sneak back and have to go to church in the morning … It was always based on that ritual.” These independently hosted dance parties were where “you could go to be yourself,” he continued. “Places outside that environment were dangerous, whether it’s to do with the police or male advances. But inside the house is safe.”

Those first two films bookend the era of Small Axe, a time of social upheaval in Britain when issues of racial justice were suddenly at the forefront of broader national consciousness. The trial of the Mangrove Nine came two years after Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, a tirade against immigration and a proposed civil-rights bill that became a touchstone for racist politics in the country. The 1970s also saw the modern Conservative Party of Britain beginning to emerge.

[Read: ‘Rivers of blood’: The legacy of a speech that divided Britain]

The period setting allowed McQueen to focus on the challenges faced by first-generation Caribbean immigrants and their children. Starting the series in 1968 “was about [showing] people establishing themselves in a real way to influence the mainstream, and that’s what West Indian people did, changed the landscape forever politically and socially and culturally,” McQueen said. “I wanted to go through the struggles and strife.” The third Small Axe film, Red, White and Blue, is set in the early ’80s and tells the real-life story of Leroy Logan (played by John Boyega), a Black police officer who joined the Metropolitan Police after his father was harassed and beaten by two members of the force.

Like many of McQueen’s characters, the police of Red, White and Blue follow their own rituals—wearing uniforms, completing training regimes, barking militaristic commands. But Logan’s fellow cops are nasty and prejudiced, bullying him and other officers of color from the minute they arrive. “For the last 60 years, Black people [in the U.K.] have been talking about the police, and white people [in the U.K.] for a long time have heard, ‘We have the best police force in the world.’ … Only now people are realizing, actually, the police aren’t the best in the world,” McQueen said of his film’s contemporary resonance.

Logan’s distinguished career was long and often tumultuous, but Red, White and Blue focuses less on his efforts to reform a toxic system and more on the personal conflict between him and his angry, disapproving father. “For me, Leroy Logan’s story was the epitome of a lot of Black people within institutions, and what they have to deal with,” McQueen said. “It’s a beautiful story in the sense that the father is the radical. Usually it’s the son who’s the radical, but [in this case] it’s switched! … It’s a very masculine story [that] represents myself and my father, [my co-writer] Courttia Newland and his father, and John Boyega’s father.”

Even more personal for McQueen is Education, the fifth and last film in the series, which looks at real-life discrimination in 1970s British schools. (The fourth entry, Alex Wheatle, is a funny and touching biography of the acclaimed novelist’s early years.) Under policies developed by Margaret Thatcher, the education secretary at the time, schools often shunted children of color to institutions for the “educationally subnormal.” Black activist parents fought to change the system, meaning that kids who came of age in the ’80s, like McQueen, didn’t have their whole lives derailed by those inequitable practices. “But if I had been in the ’70s, that would have happened to me,” McQueen said.

Because Small Axe aired on the BBC and is available online, the pandemic hasn’t stopped these carefully observed and under-told stories from reaching viewers. This was always the plan for the series—that “anyone could turn on their TV or access it through streaming and immediately get it in their homes.” McQueen said. “The ethos of Small Axe is generosity.”

Still, his visual skill had me longing to see these movies on a bigger screen. Lovers Rock, in particular, struck me as a cinematic experience that would be perfect for enjoying with a crowd. McQueen agrees, but the times are what they are, and he’s given us the next best thing—a reminder of the intoxicating joy of being in a room with other people. “My dream [for Lovers Rock] was people smashing up their seats when ‘Kunta Kinte’ comes on—that was my dream, people going nuts in the audience,” he confessed with a laugh before acknowledging that Small Axe got the release that it, and viewers, deserved. “I’m a massive fan of cinema,” McQueen said, “but sometimes you have to go where the people are.”

How good can Bruno Fernandes make Manchester United? Anfield may tell | Barney Ronay   6%

Midfield risk-taker has been a transformative signing but needs to nail it in the big games – starting at Liverpool on Sunday

This is not the beginning of the title run-in. This is not the start of the middle, or the beginning of the end. Let’s face it, nobody really knows what’s going on up there in this jetlagged oddity of a Premier League season, when points have been scattered with luxurious abandon, and none of these teams seem ready to find a sustained higher gear.

Not that it makes much difference. There will, as ever, be an urge to portray Manchester United’s trip to Liverpool on Sunday as something more decisive, a make-or-breaker, a full-on Super Sunday Judgment Day-style Showdown.

Maclaren's late goal seals victory for Melbourne City   6%

Melbourne City has kept their winning record against Western United intact, with a late goal from Jamie Maclaren giving Patrick Kisnorbo's team a 2-1 victory at AAMI Park.

The Marksman Review: In Need of a Mission   -20%

Liam Neeson plays the reluctant protector of an undocumented Mexican boy in this dusty drama.

The Raptors sweep the Hornets. Kyle Lowry delivers the dagger  

Kyle Lowry made a step-back 18-footer with just over 30 seconds to go for the game-winning basket, allowing the Raptors to post a 116-113 win over Charlotte, their second in three nights in Tampa. They made 21 three-pointers in Tampa.

Casey Stoney credits Chelsea's Emma Hayes for leading the way   -5%

Manchester United manager full of praise for her counterpart before their table-topping WSL clash

During the days when Casey Stoney played for Chelsea, little luxuries were not so much thin on the ground as nonexistent. “You couldn’t get anything, not even a tracksuit from the club back then,” says Manchester United’s manager. “But everything’s changed and that’s thanks to Emma Hayes.”

Stoney left Chelsea in 2011, the year before Hayes took transformative charge. At that time considerable scepticism still surrounded female coaches, yet nine years on her enviable trophy haul has helped reshape the topography of the now professional elite women’s game. Not to mention serving as a rebuke to its once almost default misogyny. This season, an unprecedented eight of the 12 Women’s Super League managers are female.

Top but capable of more: Manchester United upbeat for trip to Liverpool   27%

Ole Gunnar Solskjær admits United have not dazzled this term yet they lead the table and have the talents to stay there

When Ole Gunnar Solskjær says Manchester United have “not really set the world alight” this season, the manager’s true sense might be read as: “You ain’t seen nothing yet – just wait until we do catch fire.”

United arrive at Anfield on Sunday to play Liverpool as Premier League leaders, three points ahead of the champions while not at their best. That is a rosy place to be for United because they possess the quality to perform far better.

Your Daily Horoscope for Saturday, January 9   30%

Free daily horoscope for each star sign from renowned Astrologer Hedy Damari. Forecasts for the day ahead in life, love and career.

David Squires on FA Cup upstarts rubbing shoulders with the football elite   -3%

Our cartoonist on the stories of the third round, including young scorers, Adele singalongs and watching Spurs over a garden fence

• Doing some online shopping? You can buy this cartoon
• And take a look through David’s archive treasure trove

Biden swells the ranks of his White House climate team   50%

He named a raft of additional hires Thursday to his climate team, forming what observers say is the most robust climate-focused group assembled in the West Wing.

Ultimate tips to lighten acne scars   -80%

Who hasn't dealt with acne. But, dealing with acne is one problem while dealing with acne scars is another. Even if you have fought acne, the annoying scars can take a lot of time to disappear. To speed up the healing process, follow these steps and say bye-bye to acne scars:

N.H.L. and Players' Union Agree to Start Season in January  

The season would start Jan. 13 with all seven Canadian teams in one division, but authorities in Canada need to approve plans for teams to practice and play in their markets.

Chargers coach candidates: Rams defensive coordinator Brandon Staley  

Chargers coach candidates: Rams defensive coordinator Brandon Staley